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Saturday, January 28, 2012

One last go and then I must figure out how to get down outta here. I'm no good at goodbyes but, fortunately, I don't have to be in this case because we all stay in touch (in comments, e-mail, Twitter, FB…) all year 'round. Maybe even in FaceMail™ (not New Flesh -- just flesh) one of these days?

Lemme start with another anecdote: I think I was probably in college before I even thought about whether any particular movie was popular or not. I mean, I remember waiting in line for Jaws and Star Wars (look it up) in the early days of the "blockbuster," but I loved it when I'd come into a theater and find there weren't very many people. That's great -- more room for me! I don't have to worry about somebody sitting in front of me and blocking my view (particularly if the movie's subtitled), and I can spread out and put my jacket on the seat next to me. I like to slouch and flop (I have terrible posture) and my legs get cramped if I can't stretch them one way or another during the feature (and double-bills were standard practice in the second-run houses I frequented).

I never connected the number of bodies in the seats with the movie on the screen, because I didn't have to. All that mattered to me was the quality of the experience. Unless you read the NY/Hollywood trades (and a subscription to Daily Variety or Weekly Variety was expensive), the only way you knew if a movie was a "hit" was by the lines outside the theater and the mainstream press coverage it attracted. This was all before Entertainment Tonight made box office numbers as widely available as major league sports stats and "Hints from Heloise." In the early 1980s, suddenly, every newspaper was promoting these numbers as if movie distribution and exhibition were a competitive sport -- the kind of thing we're now familiar with in the approach the MSM routinely take to coverage of politics, athletics and the Oscars.

My naivete was eventually shattered when I realized that, if there were so few people in the theater when I saw a movie I really liked, chances are it wouldn't be playing the next week when I wanted to take other friends to see it: the "tyranny of the marketplace" that Krzysztof Zanussi so memorably identified for me. And maybe this is where everything we've talked about -- awards, criticism, audiences, readership, distribution and exhibition -- coalesces. It may sound trite, but as far as I'm concerned, everything comes down to quality, not quantity.

Jason, you're right: there is no correlation whatsoever between a blog's traffic and whether the contributors are getting paid or not. Likewise, there is no correlation between how good a blog is and the kind of traffic it gets, or between whether the blog is any good and whether the blogger is getting paid. Scanners' traffic fluctuates wildly, day to day, depending on the latest posts, but I like it best when it settles down to a few thousand visitors a day (a mere fraction of Roger Ebert's traffic, as you would expect) and we get more intelligent, perceptive, challenging, introspective comments. In my experience, movie fans tend to fall into three partially overlapping camps: those who like to see movies (the largest group), those who read reviews (second largest), and those who seek out the more detailed kinds of criticism you can find in film journals and certain kinds of blogs. To paraphrase what I talked about in my last post regarding Bingham Ray and John Pierson, my desire is to write about what I find interesting and hope that, if I make it sound compelling enough (or if I just get specific enough), others will find it interesting, too.

Arthur Wegee's Crowd at Coney Island (1940)

That's why it makes me so happy to learn that Scanners (now almost seven years old) was the first blog Jason read (when he was just a wee one!), and that it led him to discover other blogs like The House Next Door and SLIFR. I wrote of my appreciation of Jason's "Tinker Tailor" piece (and I love his The Conversations features with Ed Howard -- whether I "agree" -- ach! -- with what's said or not -- because the insights and thought processes are intriguing, even when they occasionally travel down a dead end, which is often an avenue worth exploring), and I've written about, linked to, tweeted, Facebooked and otherwise talked up the terrific work by everybody in the Tree House any number of times over the years.

Which is my roundabout way of saying that, although I sympathize with Boone when he says "I want the mass audience to be the tree house," I just don't think it's likely to happen. I would not trade one reader like Jason or Boone or Sheila or Simon or Dennis (or any number of others I could name, some of them Scanners regulars) for (shudder) Drudge-like numbers. I would not trade a single probing comment that makes me reconsider or redefine my ideas for pages of impotent fanboy ravings that don't have anything to do with a particular movie, written by people who don't know or care about the difference between building a substantial argument and a bogus ad hominem one.

So, I tend to dismiss the idea that film criticism has ever been very influential, except to that tautologically self-defining group of moviegoers who are interested in film criticism. Let's just acknowledge that this has always been a minority -- even in the heyday of Siskel & Ebert -- and always will be. In the era of simultaneous nationwide and worldwide theatrical releases (remember this kind of massive wide release was the exception rather than the rule before Jaws in the summer of 1975), and instant access to reviews and reactions from amateur and professional critics via any number of Internet platforms, it's still possible for a good movie to become popular, and for a popular movie to be good, but I think it has more to do with successful marketing than criticism.

The plain fact is: Movies do not become hits (even on an art-house scale) because they get good reviews. As an exhibitor, you can only hope the reviews (and the marketing) get enough of the right people (can't emphasize that enough) in the door the opening weekend, and that word will spread from there. But if the movie itself doesn't give people something to respond to, it's not going to last very long. (Well, today movies have built-in shelf-lives of just a few weeks before moving on to the next release format: On Demand, theatrical, Internet download, DVD/Blu-ray, cable/satellite….)

And so it comes back to whether filmmakers, distributors, exhibitors, critics and moviegoers believe in something enough to try to communicate their enthusiasm to others. Boone gets to the heart of it here:

I cannot accept the uncivil future, where those of us in "the rarefied reaches of the blogosphere" retreat to our arthouses and rooftop screenings and home Blu-ray collections, occasionally joining with the unwashed for some thoughtless (or even sometimes pretty great) tentpole flick. It's not enough.

There is so much passion for movies down in places that the smarter film bloggers wouldn't dare visit--with good reason. The ghettos can be dangerous places. But people live there, too. Film culture there thrives on Netflix, cable and bootleg DVD's, and the discussions can become as intense as the fight Hoberman recalls having with Pauline Kael over the documentary Shoah. Except that the range of movies under discussion doesn't reach even a fraction as far "up" as our treehouse talks range "down." An intrepid film blogger like Dennis can dig Brett Ratner's Tower Heist, an Eddie Murphy comedy that a great many in the lower classes are likely to have seen, and Certified Copy, a film just as accessible and relevant to their lives but from which they are discouraged from even peeking at, like Bronx teenagers shooed out of Bronxville. There are spiritual riches in all kinds of movies, but only a certain class of people gets a gander at the whole menu.

I don't know what to do about that -- or if there's anything I ever could do. I will say this: Perhaps the most popular thing I've ever done on the web was my "In the Cut" piece on an action sequence in The Dark Knight, a cross-posting at Press Play and Scanners that has more than 220,000 views on Vimeo. This is a really detailed, 19-and-a-half-minute, shot-by-shot analysis in which I raised any reservations I could think of about nearly every shot choice (deliberately -- as I spelled out in my intro, I wanted to discover why I'd found the sequence so confusing, and a lot of it had to do with the sheer number of decisions that were vague enough they could be read ambiguously, when eliminating the uncertainties would have been so simple).

But I'm not fooling myself. It got attention because it was about The Dark Knight and it was mentioned on some comic book and gaming blogs that get much, much more traffic than mine! What was odd was the intensity of the response -- from those who engaged with it in the spirit in which it was offered (I certainly didn't expect everyone to read it the way I did), to those who would have none of it ("Nobody looks at movies this way!" said someone who was apparently in blinding denial, since I manifestly did), or those who thought that a legitimate response was to change the subject entirely: "You don't like it because you don't like The Dark Knight (isn't that putting the hart before the course?) and you don't like Christopher Nolan, so you are simply pursuing a nasty vendetta!"; or "You think you're right but really you're not!"; or "You chose a counter-example from Salt? That invalidates any arguments you may have made because that movie sucked, so you do, too!"; or "Why do you keep trying to make me feel bad and talk me into not liking something I already like?"; or "There are no established principles for continuity editing!"; or "Nolan isn't interested in those old rules!"; or "It's hard to make a movie and I'm sure they did the best they could, so cut them some slack!"; and so on… Man, it's hard to keep legitimate discussions on track when so many who aren't used to critical thinking (or don't think it matters) are simply determined to *win* by derailing it. Look at the GOP presidential candidates. I can say no more.

I could go on (I have gone on!) but I'd like to touch on one more thing, tangentially related to Sheila's remarks about Iranian films. (This is Not a Film hasn't screened in my neck of the woods.) As you know, I like to look very closely at how films achieve their magic after I've let them have their way with me (and I am a very impressionable moviegoer). People often ask if this doesn't "ruin" the movies for me, but I can honestly say that never even occurred to me. I'm the kind of fellow who might like to take a watch apart to see how it works, but I don't think that spoils the mystery of time itself. I had been thinking about an alternative to the "better than" list -- I'm suspicious of "either/or" arguments in favor of "also/besides" -- and it occurred to me that Certified Copy and A Separation would make a dynamite double-bill. Only after much consideration did I recall that, also, the writer-directors of both films are Iranian.

Quick flashback: I know I've told this story before, but when I was a mere lad of 18 or 19 I saw Taxi Driver in its initial release and it shook me to the core. It still does. One of the reasons I think I like to approach movies the way I do comes from the experience of, years later, coming in to a University District repertory house near the end of the picture and seeing, for the first time, how the shootout sequence was achieved. In those days (late 1970s) the movies were ephemeral, temporal phenomena -- they took place before your eyes and there was no stopping them. I had always been so worked up by the time Travis made his final approach to Sport the pimp that the rest of the sequence was a nightmare from which I couldn't awaken. But coming in just before the sequence, I was able to observe everything: the nauseatingly desaturated color (at the MPAA's request!), jerkily sped-up and agonizingly slowed-down effects that turn the figures into marionettes, compressing and expanding time and space…

Anyway, after watching Certified Copy a couple times, I wanted to see if I could pin down some of the movie's slipperier moments. But the more I tried to locate the precise moment in which a shift seems to occur (a cut, a glance, a gesture, a line), the more elusive it became. I haven't seen A Separation a second time, but it strikes me as a similarly slippery movie: the characters' actions, words, body language and motivations are forever adjusting to new circumstances and emotions. Is there any verifiable "truth" or "reality" in either of these movies? I'm not sure -- and, above all, I don't think either of the filmmakers is terribly interested in positing possible answers. The shifting, the ability to hold multiple possibilities in mind at once, is the essence of the experience. Some questions are more meaningful than others, and some don't have answers, even if it may be important to ask them anyway, if only so you can see that they don't lead anywhere.

Which leads me to… The End. I do hope Dennis will invite us again next year. But in closing, I wanted to address Our Gracious Host's final challenge, which was to recommend "a movie you loved from 2011 that you feel would translate well to a large audience who might not have been exposed to it." This reminds me of an old guy on the Floating Film Festival -- not a "movie person" by any stretch of the imagination -- who objected to my showing documentaries such as Chris Wilcha's The Target Shoots First, Julia Sweeney's God Said Ha! (based on her stage monolog) and Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan's The Corporation in successive years.

"Those aren't even movies!" he said in disgust. And I realized that, for many people, "movies" are nothing more or less than fictional feature films, shown in commercial theaters, with movie stars -- not something made by somebody with with a video camera, or some gal blabbing about her brother's cancer, or people sitting around talking accompanied by stock footage and animations. (Really, I think this particular rich guy was bothered by what he viewed as the anti-capitalist tone running through all these movies, but that's another story.)

So, would a "large audience" sit still for a movie about a couple white people walking around Tuscany talking about art and marriage -- when you can't even tell how they know each other from scene to scene, moment to moment? I don't know. I suppose Uncle Boonmee is out simply because ghosts and red-eyed monkey-people appear and they don't scare anybody or explain themselves. Carnage? No, it's a play and some people don't get the Buñuelian joke that the characters can't leave the room even though they would "in real life." (It's not "real life.") Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy? Great movie (I mean, as in will go down in film history as a classic), but a lot of people think it should be more explicitly about the plot than about what's going on underneath.

But what about Errol Morris's Tabloid? It's perfectly commercial in so many ways: there's sex, comedy, scandal, betrayal, obsession, mystery, S&M, skullduggery, public hysteria, science-fiction colliding with science-fact, cute doggies -- and a leading lady who makes the Bridesmaids look like nuns!

That is all for now. See you all soon at your pads, and mine, I hope!

Affectionately and arboreally yours,jeeem

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Jim Emerson is a film critic whose work can be found at MSN as well as many other outlets, in print and online. He is also the Web master for Roger Ebert.com and presides over his own filmic domain, the influential and excellent blog Scanners.

Friday, January 27, 2012

I apologize for my delayed response; Sundance has been kicking my ass.

So how to start the last post of this thoroughly exciting annual meeting? Uh...well. Oh, okay, I got it: I don't like the idea of one-size fits all cinema. Which in a way is what Jason's second post hints at, I think: that many people will only respond to movies if they are already implicitly great.

"...the bottom line is that if we want the masses to be moved we need movies to move the masses. On the side, we can champion. We can articulate. We can encourage. But for passion for cinema to be deep and pure, it has to be inspired by what's on the screen. Period."

I know I'm quoting that line out of context but, well, it's the "period," that gets to me. I don't know who my readers are anymore than I know who "the masses" are. No clue. Who are you, gentle readers, anyway? No idea and I like it like that.

So maybe it's my bias as a member of the small group already obsessed with movies, the 1%-ers or what-have-you. But I don't think it's so simple as saying that people need to be moved by what they see. I hated Donnie Darko first time around. And then I rewatched it and I loved it. It takes rewatching, context, examination to love some films. It's not as easy as that line implies, is what I want to say, I guess. Do people even know what they want to see? Do we know this? Who are "people?" I'm so confused....

I should probably point out now that I'm not angry at Jason or anything. Jason, I'm not picking on you, okay? NOT DOING THAT, OKAY?!

In any case, I agree that people have to be moved by the movies, yes. What I don't agree with is the underlying assumption that it's just a matter of people responding to what they see, that taste is automatic. Because what the masses have access to on a regular basis is frequently not stuff I find is worthwhile. I have biases, prejudices, interests, whatever-the-fuck. But as a critic, I assume the work is to get people to see where I'm coming from, take my opinions and turn them into an articulate argument and make my case for what I think is worthwhile. It's subjective, totally and completely. Which is why I keep bringing up the fact that I'm coming at this thing from a narrow perspective. Because it's me telling you to seek out Road to Nowhere and Saya Samurai, too. But it's also my arguments that I'm hoping you'll respect and not discount simply because, "Oh, well, he likes that kind of film..." or whatever. At no point do I think, "Well, what's going to connect with everybody?" Because it's a balancing act when you decide what's worth covering: what needs to be panned, what needs to be praised, what needs to be grappled with as a messy but exciting whatsit. And that in turn is a matter of, "Well, who's going to want coverage of this anyway?"

Which just about brings me to my point (Finally, right?): I don't recommend movies in my reviews, I write about whether or not they're worth seeing. As anal as it may sound, there is a difference. A recommendation is what I make to a friend. A review is what I do when I want to lay out what works about a film and what doesn't. So when Dennis asks us to recommend a terrific movie that we think will connect with as many people as possibly, I think it needs to be said: this is not a review. To paraphrase Sheila's favorite line from This is Not a Film, if I can review a film, why recommend it?

So in the spirit of not being an asshole, here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to recommend a film and nudge you nice, sexy readers towards my review of it. Because I take great pride in writing a little about every film I see. It's a project I'm a bit behind on at the moment. But I even try to write even a line or two about movies I don't have to cover and don't have much to say about. Because it makes reviewing easier, if that makes sense.

Anywhodles, here, after all that ranting is my pick: A Dangerous Method. My thinking is that my nana is the masses. That's right, no foolin', she totally is. My nana is a smart, funny and incredibly astute movie-watcher. She knows what she likes, too, and she is squeamish when it comes to stuff that she, well, just doesn't like (seeing Rushmore with her and my late grandfather was a uniquely dispiriting experience: my sister and I loved it, and my grandparents were appalled). So she has conservative tastes but she is a good sport and likes movies of all stripes. She is my litmus test. And I think she'd dig the new David Cronenberg movie. Sounds weird, huh?

Well, that's kind of why I think it's the right pick for Dennis's challenge. A Dangerous Method is freaky, funny and uniquely off-kilter. It's also a movie that is superficially square and hence is inviting enough that my nana would be willing to give it a chance and then probably like it. A Dangerous Method is about sex and psycho-analysis, yes, but it's also a nice, respectable period drama, too. Which is what I think makes the film that much more subversive and deliriously enjoyable: Cronenberg CAN have his cake and eat it, too--he's David freaking Cronenberg. He knows how to be all things to all people. He also knows exactly how to pointedly load an image with icky and bizarre implications.

But don't just take this rambling, probably-stupid recommendation at face value, check out my review. Here's an excerpt if you're allergic to hyper-links or something:

"Because A Dangerous Method follows Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung as they butt heads over their respective theories of psychoanalysis, it stands to reason that the smallest gesture in the film is full of meaning. Repeated tics, like the placement of hands on hips, or even when one character suffers a sudden, seizure-like paroxysm right after Jung discusses the symbolic death of one of his patients' fathers, are rather funny. But these actions also connote so much without really saying anything at all. Leave it to Cronenberg to make a nip slip a telling sign of the schizoid nature of Sabina Spielrein, one of Jung's most infamous patients. Cronenberg constantly uses overloaded images, including, yes, a cigar, to intrude on and indirectly raise the stakes of his film's central drama. These absurdly loaded images serve to subversively heighten the pathos inherent in Hampton's source drama."

Doesn't sound like a nana-friendly film, does it? Maybe, but I think it is. For whatever that's worth.

Bottom line for me is: I don't know what the masses want or will respond to anymore than I know what my fellow 1%ers will react to. I'd like to think it's the same stuff that I consider to be superlative and wonderful and cuckoo go nuts. But I don't know. That kind of speculation has to come with a shit ton of qualifiers, I think, because, well, I don't know you, dear reader and I'm not your best buddy. Unless I am, in which case, hey, uh, that's nice! So I have no idea but maybe you'll like A Dangerous Method.

And if you're reading this, nana, I love you and am going to find a copy of this film for you, okay?

Thursday, January 26, 2012

At the risk of alienating however many readers we have left, I'd like to begin this final post at the same place I left off, with the creation sequence in The Tree of Life. I know, I know: Enough with Malick, already! I understand. But, please, give me a chance, because I think this story is worth sharing, and it might be appreciated more by the film's detractors than by its orgasmic fans.

I saw The Tree of Life at the theater four times last year. Not once did I see it on a particularly big screen, and in fact the theaters got smaller each time. The last time I saw it, in its final week before it left Washington, DC, The Tree of Life had been relegated to a theater with just three rows super-close to the screen and then two rows even closer than that. I sat in the back row, and in front of me sat a group of about eight people - coworkers for the most part, it seemed, plus one or two significant others.

Because the theater was so small, and because I was now very familiar with the movie, I inevitably glanced in the group's direction to see how they were responding. Once I did, it was hard to look away. From right to left, the gang of eight ran the gamut from enthralled to befuddled to disgruntled - or so I deduced by the frequency with which they shook their heads and the amount of the movie they endured before walking out. Four of them went the distance and lingered through the credits. Two of them nearly made it to the beach sequence before bailing. And the other two left about midway through the childhood sequence, with one of them pausing on the way out to whisper to the group's ringleader: "You're a cruel, cruel man."

To borrow a phrase I read on Twitter today, it would be tempting to typecast those "premature evacuators" as intellectual lightweights who want their cinema no more adventurous than a fast-food hamburger, and maybe they were. But whatever its inspiration, their nonstop fidgeting made it clear that those who didn't "feel" The Tree of Life weren't rejecting what was happening on screen so much as they didn't think anything was "happening" at all.

As someone who is deeply moved by Malick's intimate epic, their reaction confused me. Nothing happening? Why, in the creation scene, everything is happening! And yet at the same time, I understood. Because, the truth is, that night I didn't strongly feel The Tree of Life either, not even during the creation sequence.

The problem wasn't that I'd become desensitized to the movie's awe. The problem was that the awe was actually missing. Yes, technically, this was the same movie I'd seen the three times before, but there was one big difference: the volume wasn't cranked to 11. The sound wasn't so low that the uninitiated would have noticed; Sean Penn's mumbling was hard to hear, sure, but it's that way by design. But during the creation sequence, when the spindle of light appears and "Lacrimosa" is supposed to be blaring with the kind of volume that something as enormous as the creation of the universe demands, the theater walls didn't tremble, and thus my soul didn't either.

See, there's a reason that The Tree of Life's Blu-ray edition begins with a recommendation that you "play it loud," because, sure enough, that night, with the score perfectly audible but not colossal, my favorite scene didn't feel like a religious experience at all. Instead, it played like pretty pictures set to music. A vacation slideshow. A screensaver.

In that moment, I saw the movie the way its detractors do. I was on the outside looking in. And I hated it there.

I wish I could say that's the only time I felt that way in 2011, but of course it wasn't.

Sheila has beautifully described her powerful reaction to Melancholia, but as much as I was moved by the first half of the film - including that terrific scene with the paper hot-air balloons - and Kirsten Dunst's performance overall, there are parts of Melancholia that I felt thudded like a lead balloon, either at the time or after the fact.

For example, where the movie's fans see triumph, heroism and/or redemption in the movie's conclusion, when Dunst's character builds a fortress of sticks to "protect" her nephew from the oncoming cataclysm, I see nothing more than resignation and basic human decency, which is honest, sure, but not overwhelming. Meanwhile, as the months go by, I find I'm increasingly put off by the now relatively famous scene in which Dunst's character sprawls naked in the light of the doomsday planet. It's a beautiful image, no doubt, but it doesn't make sense to me: If Melancholia (the planet) is a symbol of depression itself, then there's nothing alluring (never mind arousing) about it. And if instead the planet is the deus ex machina that Dunst's character has been longing for, a deathly means to end her depression, that doesn't work for me either, because thoughts of "the end" provide relief for the depressed, not euphoria.

And then there's War Horse, which, according to my earlier anonymity exercise, Dennis thinks would benefit if freed from Spielbergian expectations, while I think it's been given the benefit of the doubt precisely because of the legend attached. War Horse is a fine movie, don't get me wrong, and I was sporadically moved by its emotions and imagery, in particular the first shot of the saddled horse sprinting through the forest after its rider has been gunned down, and the scene in which Spielberg tactfully hides the execution of two runaway soldiers with the passing sweep of a windmill.

But even setting aside the opening act that channels The Quiet Man and the closing sequence that channels Gone With the Wind, which make for some of the sloppiest emotionality in Spielberg's career (and that's saying something), I couldn't escape the feeling that Spielberg was committing the same mistake that The Help was (somewhat fairly, somewhat unfairly) lambasted for over the summer, because even amidst tragedy War Horse wants everyone to be having a good time.

It's fair to point out that Spielberg made War Horse as a family film, and thus the horrors of World War I needed to be mostly sterilized; I get that. But think of how powerful that scene with the British and German soldiers working together to free the horse from the wire would be if Spielberg had dared to convey the warring parties as distinct tribes, rather than presenting WWI like a minor disagreement among one sprawling European family that everyone knew would blow over with time and a few shootouts.

And, yeah, Jim, what about We Need to Talk About Kevin? I can't think of a single movie from 2011 that I found so penetrating and so silly in equal measure. I had the great fortune of seeing this movie "cold" (and if you don't know a thing about We Need to Talk About Kevin, skip the rest of this paragraph), and over the first 20 minutes it provided a thrilling experience, as the elliptical storytelling and Tilda Swinton's transfixing yet enigmatic performance invite us to puzzle out this broken woman's past and present trauma. As a portrait of parental guilt, regret and ultimately unbreakable love, this movie is profound. But the other half, with the crazed problem child who seems to be maliciously fucking with his mother's sanity before he's even out of diapers? It's a joke. And whether it's an intentional joke or not - I honestly can't tell - it cheapens what might otherwise be a cutting examination of parent-child dysfunction.

There are other movies that did well on critics' year-end best lists that failed to register with me. Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives seared some powerful images into my brain, but it never touched my soul. A Dangerous Method engrossed me as I was watching it, but by the time I was home from the theater the effect had worn off, never to return, and Jane Eyre, similarly, vanished from memory like a ghost. And so on.

But this is how moviegoing works. In the big picture, on the widest of screens, it's good to be on the outside every once in a while, because it makes coming inside feel so much better, like being invited into a friend's home where a fire is burning and chocolate chip cookies are baking in the oven on a cold winter day.

Although The Tree of Life was in my crosshairs in 2010, often it's the surprises that warm us most. Warrior was a surprise for me, and in a way Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was, too, because I never could have predicted how emotional I'd find it on second viewing. And so I wonder what I would have thought of, say, The Arist had I gotten to the movie before its Oscar campaign got to me. Expectations can be a bitch, you know.

I say that en route to Dennis' challenge: What movie out of the top 100 do I think deserves to be seen by a wider audience? Well, excluding documentaries, I'm going to go with a movie I name-dropped in one of my previous installments: Blackthorn, the retirement tale of Butch Cassidy. It's a feast for the eyes, includes the best chase sequence I saw all year and embraces its place in the shadow of 1969's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid without sacrificing its own identity.

Despite its panoramic views, Blackthorn is a small picture, so whether it holds up to expectations, I don't know. But if you watch it, do me one favor, do the movie a favor and do yourself a favor: play it loud.

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Jason Bellamy ruminates on cinema at The Cooler and is a regular contributor to Slant Magazine's The House Next Door, coauthoring The Conversations series with Ed Howard. He's also a contributor to Press Play. Follow him on Twitter.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

I don't want to leave our tree house. But that is the great thing about the Internet. I can still visit you guys any time I want!

Dennis, you wrote in your beautiful latest: "This past year I discovered that I have faith, if you will, in my ability to see what’s in front of me, to put less stock in mythology and predigested interpretation, be it applied to matters of art or the spirit. And I still think there’s room for faith in the movies too. "

What a wonderful concept. It's a fun challenge, isn't it, to come to all of these movies as fresh as we can, while still, of course, filtering them through our own life experiences. That's what the movies are all about. Stories are projected up onto the giant screen. Audiences gather in the dark (or they sit in their homes watching), and while, of course, they see the story up there, they also see parts of themselves, their own stories, dreams, memories, reflections, regrets. I had what can only be described as a profound experience, watching both Melancholia and Tree of Life this year, and it is difficult to talk about because it was so profound (although you all have done wonderful jobs articulating it. Jason and Steven, your words on the creation sequence in Tree of Life gave me goosebumps!) Both films provided different types of transcendence, but all I know is, while I was watching them I was somehow catapulted out of "Self" and into another realm entirely.

I was not fully normal (well, I am never fully normal) for a couple of hours after seeing both films. After seeing Melancholia at a screening room in the middle of Times Square, I emerged into the rain, dazed and dazzled by the crowds around me. I was in a private huge space of my own, and yet felt somehow connected to the everyday throngs jostling through the streets. I didn't have an umbrella. I hunched my head down and walked to the bus, and I am lucky I didn't get run over by a cab, I was so far elsewhere in my mind. I treasure experiences like that and I was lucky, I had two of them this year in the movie theatre. Both films are also films I continue to visit in my mind. They have woven themselves into the fabric of my thinking. Out of nowhere, I will remember Kirsten Dunst running in slow-mo through the woods in her wedding dress. Or I will think of all of those flame-filled balloons being set off over the lawn, one of the most beautiful images in the film.

Out of nowhere I will remember Brad Pitt's chunky tough hands clamped down on his son's neck, and will think of my own father, how much I love him, how much I miss him. I wrote in my review of Tree of Life that those childhood sequences are filmed and edited in the way that memories actually work. It's a collage, it's sense-based (memories come to us through the five senses), and it's not linear. The same images repeat, although with different focus, different angles. I did not grow up in Texas in the 1950s, but that was irrelevant. The film gave me a vast amount of space to project my own life up there, my own memories, and there were moments when I thought watching it, "Yes. Yes. That is just what Memory is like." I can't think of another film, off the top of my head, that nails the ephemeral fleeting and yet powerful feeling of memory so accurately. It wasn't just beautiful to look at. It rocked me a bit.

When it comes to your box office challenge, Dennis, I come up a bit cold. The majority of my movie-viewing is done at home, and very few are current releases. I can barely keep up with my Dana Andrews obsession, my Joseph Cotten obsession, and now, my Elvis Presley obsession, let alone all of the movies released in any given year.

In looking back over my viewing for the year, however, I do want to recommend Cold Weather, a film that is pretty near perfect. After doing the festival circuit of 2010, it got its release here in New York in February of 2011. It is the third feature by director Aaron Katz. It tells the story of a brother and sister (Doug and Gail) in Portland. Doug had been going to get a degree in forensic science but he dropped out of college and moved home to work in an ice plant. He is a bit aimless, which may set up the expectation that this may be just another independent film featuring aimless kids talking about life and the world over endless cups of coffee. But Aaron Katz is up to something else. Doug is obsessed with Sherlock Holmes. He loves the books. He gets together with an old girlfriend for coffee, and she seems ... weird. Like she might be hiding something. Soon after that, she disappears. Nobody knows what happened to her. And aimless Doug (played beautifully and simply by Cris Lankenau) suddenly finds himself in the middle of a real-life mystery. He ropes in a colleague at the ice plant, Carlos (Raúl Castillo), who is also a DJ and a Trekkie. Carlos becomes the Watson to Doug's Sherlock.

My review of this odd lovely little film describes my passion for it. Once the mystery comes into play, you think - because you have seen so many crime movies - that you know how it is going to go. There will be shootouts and tense car chases. People will hide in closets. Secrets will be revealed. None of that occurs. What a pleasure it was to watch events unfold and to have no idea what was going to happen next! Cold Weather is not an ironic wink about genre films. Aaron Katz had been working on a script about a brother and sister, because that relationship fascinated him and he felt that movies don't often portray it accurately or well. At the very same time, Katz was becoming obsessed with the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, so he decided to throw that into the mix and see what would happen. Cold Weather actually is a mystery. The film has it both ways: it is a genre film, and it is a comment on the beauty of genre films. It is also a beautifully shot tender independent film, about the wary love between a young-adult brother and sister. There's a magic to Cold Weather. It's moody, somber, suddenly funny, and has a great ear for the cadences of how young people talk to each other. In the middle of a tense moment, Carlos says desperately to Doug, “Dude, you know about these kinds of things.” Doug asks, “What kinds of things?” “Mysteries, man.”

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

This past year was the occasion in my personal life for what some might term a “crisis of faith,” though that would hardly be my term for it. The crisis of faith came a long time ago, but this year I was able to finally put my feelings about my religious faith, or lack thereof, into some kind of working order and embrace my agnosticism. One of the key elements in helping me through my own wrestling match was the testimony (if I may appropriate that word) of Julia Sweeney on the subject of the absence of faith and her acceptance, as a fellow ex-Catholic, of atheism, in particular her wonderful CD Letting Go of God, which I encountered about four years ago. (Atheism expresses the certainty of God’s absence, whereas agnosticism rejects religious certainty and acknowledges that there is no way to know one way or the other.)

But even more important was the confluence of my desire to work through the implications of agnosticism with the release of a book which I’m sure I’ll consider important to me for the rest of my life, Vincent Bugliosi’s Divinity of Doubt. In the book, Bugliosi approaches all elements of religious faith, primarily the mythology of Christianity and the writing of the Bible, but also Judaism, Hinduism and Muslim faith—in fact, the very concept of faith itself—as well as the numerous hypocrisies and inconsistencies that arise from them, from (not surprisingly) an entirely logical point of view. (If you’re thinking that, well, logic has no place within a system of faith, Bugliosi would probably agree that faith is certainly not based on logic, but disagree with the idea that logic cannot be applied to examine fallacies based on faith.) I was even lucky enough to see Bugliosi speak on the book over the summer and talk to him briefly.

What does this have to do with the Year of Our Lord 2011 in movies? Well, it turns out there was plenty of relevancy to the subject of faith and what the late great Warren Zevon once called “the vast indifference of heaven” present in the movies I saw this year, and each encounter helped me process my own feelings and grope around with what would come to be my own understanding. I would not classify myself in any way as a clinically depressed person, though after reading and absorbing Bugliosi’s book and coming to my own conclusions about what an acceptance of God’s absence really meant, it was not a leap at all to accept the release, the freedom of obliteration that Kirsten Dunst experiences at (SPOILER ALERT) the apocalyptic conclusion of Melancholia as a kind of upbeat ending. This is, after all, the apocalypse brought down to the expressly personal—how depression becomes an interior Armageddon— not a Roland Emmerich epic where part of the “fun” is watching the digitized spectacle of hundreds of millions of people being flushed to their doom. And by the way, I’m not in any way saying that whatever one’s religious beliefs might be would necessarily have anything to do with interpreting Von Trier’s big-bang climax, or any other movie. I’m just saying that this is how the planets aligned for me.

But it might have something to do with my reaction to the other cosmic contemplation on screens this year, Terence Malick’s newly Academy-approved The Tree of Life. Malick’s perspective is one which holds not just the possibility but the likelihood that a guiding spiritual intelligence is responsible for the world as we know it (or at least as he shows it). It’s there not just in the film’s imagery but also implied in the ethereal, disconnected voices crossing all time and space and locations as they do here. It’s the film’s willingness to pluck us out of the sun-dappled comfort zone of Malick’s reverie of boyhood and back beyond the existence of the first men and women that suggested to me what might be on Malick’s mind regarding this spiritual presence, and Jim’s dino challenge led me to think that accusations of Malick being a bit too much of a flower child when it comes to nature are wrongheaded.

There's obvious validity to the point that most seem to take from the sequence-- the speculation as to a possible early instance of compassion in an earthly species. But nature here, however beautiful, is also a formidable, unruly, frightening thing, and I think if this possibility of compassion in inarticulate, non-logical, survival-oriented species like dinosaurs was the end-all, then, yes, that would strike me as a bit starry-eyed. This being Malick, however, it wouldn't be the end-all, would it? I see in the sequence all kinds of reminders, even if they don't manifest themselves fully (or at all), of the possibility of nature's rage, or at least its inhospitable quality. (It's the first thing I thought of when I saw those floating clumps of seaweed and thought about what they might be hiding, followed by the lovely imagery of all those hammerhead sharks cruising through the water as seen from far below.)

The sense of wonder mixed with the sense of foreboding is there right from the start of the sequence, through the formation of the fetal creature, staring out with eyes at once more fascinating and more fearful than those of the Star Child's, right on through to the celebrated dino encounter, in which we see the creatures on the move and at rest. It's a captivating, fascinating sequence that does, as Sheila suggested, give you room to kick the tires of your various responses to the film as a whole around a bit. It also made me wish Malick had built an entire feature around this alternate, allusive kind of perspective on planetary history instead. One Scanners reader made a more overt connection of the sequence to the main characters and observed:

"I saw, in what plays out between the two dinosaurs, a reflection of young Jack's relationship with his overbearing father, so it made me consider the story of the O'Briens as being something both personal and cosmic, repeating and reflecting in life since life's beginnings."

Or maybe the dominant dino, rather than discovering a strange, unlikely impulse of compassion, just got distracted by something else to go pounce on and rip to shreds.

It's very telling (at least to me) that, as captivating as the sequence is, as soon as that searching narration comes back in and the movie's main template reasserts itself, I immediately start to lose my patience, even in viewing the sequence out-of-context as Jim provided it, and I had to believe, when I first saw it, the possibility existed that I may have just lost my taste for cosmic rumination of this sort. That asteroid (or whatever it is) hits, implying the event that will lead to the extinction of all these mysterious creatures (one that Malick wisely leaves to the realm of Fantasia) and I'm agog all over again. And then Sean Penn stumbles in and suddenly I remember the uncomfortable seats and the sticky theater floor. Is this what it was like to be cast out of the Garden of Eden?

The movies I saw that dealt more overtly with religious faith, or religious hypocrisy, were even more of a mixed bag. The one I was most looking forward to was Vera Farmiga’s Higher Ground, which depicts a woman’s journey from a blooming religious awareness through her baptism and experience in a tightly-knit (some might say oppressive) church community, and into her own crisis of faith. (The movie is divided into chapters, with title cards like “Summons,” “Renegade,” “”Consumed” and “Wilderness” leading the way.) It’s fascinating to watch Farmiga’s character submerge herself in this culture—her genuine desire for spiritual transcendence is depicted not with arched eyebrows but with the kind of respect that movies do not often afford the depiction of religious identity. She sees a friend who speaks in tongues and cannot understand why she can’t feel the same flush of spiritual fire—to her it sounds “beautiful,” but her own attempts to “speak in the Spirit” signal her increasing desperation. Unfortunately, Farmiga signals her own intelligence too stridently when she does break away from the church and the script hits too many bullet points about male- dominated religious society a bit too squarely on the nose. Higher Ground maintains its respect for faith, but it doesn’t dig deeply enough into what it really means to lose it.

Better Higher Ground’s clumsy earnestness than Kevin Smith’s pompous blasts of righteous hot air, though. The indie director’s self-distributed Red State, a tone-deaf horror movie fashioned as a diatribe against religious fanaticism (and, as it turns out, the misguided federal aggression against it echoed in its gory Waco-esque second half), turns out to be the worst sort of preaching to the converted. Smith imagines what might happen if a group of horny high school boys are held hostage and tortured by a Christian fundamentalist sect not unlike the membership of Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church. But the spectacularly unpleasant result feels like what it must be like to get stuck between two opposing sides at a Phelps protest—it’s a harangue rather than an examination of the impulses of fanatical belief or even a good piece of pulp drama, and everybody, including the director, comes off looking bad. (Well, everybody but Michael Parks, who manages to deliver a real, fiery, magnetic performance.) Smith even directly references Phelps in the dialogue and consequently lets his real-life target off the hook—when a cop refers to the religious whackos in question, another character makes sure to distinguish between Phelps (apparently just a crackpot) and these guys, the villainous bloodthirsty Christians of the movie, who are really dangerous. (Way to avoid that lawsuit!) If you’re looking for genuine Phelps-inspired outrage, better to see Fall from Grace and deal with the real thing than sit through Kevin Smith’s ugly tirade and watch him pat himself on the back for 90 minutes.

I also found myself contemplating my own journey toward a position on faith while watching movies as disparate as Chang-dong Lee’s Poetry; Asif Kapadia’s splendid and unusual documentary Senna, about the Brazilian Formula One racer Ayrton Senna, about whom I knew nothing when I began watching the film (Thanks for the recommend, Jason!); Richard Press’s Bill Cunningham New York, the fashion photographer about whom I was also clueless; and Steven Spielberg’s magnificent War Horse.

Specifically, there is a moment in BCNY in which the filmmaker/interviewer, after having us spend about an hour in his subject’s garrulous, irascible, eccentric presence, asks him personal questions which he insists Cunningham can defer answering if he so chooses. The first, about his sexuality, is greeted by Cunningham with semi-guarded candor and humor. But the second query, about the role of religious observance in Cunningham’s life, finds Cunningham lowering his head and retreating into an uncomfortably long silence, from which he eventually emerges and offers some hesitant connections between the ritual of church and his family’s working-class background. It’s an emotionally devastating moment, coming as it does amongst all the celebration of Cunningham’s working methodology, one that speaks to conflicts well-hidden whose presence, however briefly glimpsed, offers sublime dimensions in a character portrait that accent the sensitivity of the documentary as a whole.

War Horse touched me in ways that went beyond concerns of faith, though it is certainly emblematic of a certain kind of faith, in humanity, in our connection with creatures some might see as beneath us. To reference Jason’s previous plea, if the movies must move us then for me faith that this one might do so, and profoundly, was well rewarded. The movie’s power goes beyond Spielberg’s obvious mastery of a certain kind of old-fashioned epic moviemaking, which is obviously not enough for some. (I’ve heard War Horse derided as the most lavish Disney movie ever made.) For me the experience became a reminder of the ways that a movie—any movie-- can transport us emotionally, spiritually, even when the heartstrings are not being plucked. (I’ve already overstayed my welcome in the Tree House today, so I promise I’ll have more to say in my year-end round-up about War Horse.)

Your speculation, Jason, about releasing movies anonymously really resonated with me, however, because I was thinking the same thing when I saw both War Horse and The Tree of Life. Not that both artists (and yes, product of Hollywood and unreliable as he may be, I do consider Spielberg an artist) wouldn't be instantly identifiable by what’s on screen, but I wonder how much of the distaste for Spielberg’s movie, and consequently the reverence, or at least the heightened expectations for Malick’s, would be adjusted if audiences (or perhaps more to the point, critics) didn’t know going in who the director of each film was. I believe that if all context could be removed and War Horse could be viewed outside of one’s negative or positive notions of what Spielberg brings to the table—say, if it were presented as a lost wide-screen classic from the ‘50s—some of the resistance to its confidence as a piece of filmmaking might be eroded.

Of course this is never going to happen, for reasons you’ve already articulated, Jim. There’s no way to approach a movie without at least a few preconceived expectations, especially in this day and age where publicists and the Internet all but assure what little mystery there may be about any given movie can be potentially decoded without having to see the actual thing. But I also really appreciate what you said about bias:

I'm all for 'bias' as much as I am for 'elitism'… of course, I treasure those rare opportunities to see a movie 'cold,' without knowing much of anything about it except, maybe, for a few names of those involved. Sometimes (at screenings or film festivals) I've known even less than that. But what some people call 'bias' is really better described as experience, intelligence, passion.”

I haven’t yet seen The Descendants, and from what I’ve experienced of Alexander Payne’s previous movies, as well as what I’ve seen in clips and, yes, positive and negative reactions from writers whom I trust, I suspect that the movie may not be for me. Of course I’ll still go see it, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have some preconceived notions as to what it might be like, and what my reaction to it might be like. However, the movie ultimately must prove itself, and I trust myself to be able to react to what I’m seeing, whether it conforms to my biased assumptions or not, and to react honestly. Because really, there’s about as much objectivity at work in the art of film criticism as there is in network TV journalism. And anyway, I’m not interested in anyone who calls themselves an “objective” critic, as if one could separate one’s personal experience from how one responds to a movie and then articulates that response. The difference lies in the ability to prove the case about one’s observations, even after acknowledging that bias. This past year I discovered that I have faith, if you will, in my ability to see what’s in front of me, to put less stock in mythology and predigested interpretation, be it applied to matters of art or the spirit. And I still think there’s room for faith in the movies too.

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Dennis Cozzalio is the proprietor of the blog you are now reading as well as the gatekeeper of the Tree House. Come on in and grab a brew. Don’t cost nothin’.

First, to answer Jim's Tree of Life challenge: As mentioned earlier, I saw it on the big screen twice last year with Sheila and Jason, separately. Each time, the so-called Creation sequence sent me to the stratosphere. The teetering cosmic spindle that Jason describes filled me awe. The outer space effects were awesome not because they were spectacular, but because of the real mysteries they represent.

What is all that out there, beyond the sky, and in there, between cells and atoms and subatomic particles? What is the design, and who is the designer? Folks who shrugged these contemplative images off as mere up-rezzed screensavers strike me as the kind of people who don't contemplate much at all. Or prefer knottier, more philosophically convoluted or intellectually accredited contemplation. Maybe Malick wouldn't appreciate the compliment, but: this film is as plain and simple as Lutheran Sunday school.

And the dinosaurs! Just as he does with humans, Malick chose to capture these creatures at rest, dying or otherwise in between the big, dynamic gestures. The boldest move he shows us is one dino stepping on the head of an ailing one and, after a beat, retreating just when we expect it to move in for the kill. It was pretty clear to me that Malick was preaching that grace and nature have been sparring within the sentience of living beings the as long as the world can remember, that human beings are only a refinement (but far from a perfection) of this process. The Creator sketches and experiments in nature the way scientists and artists do in their labs and studios.

Malick's god is winging it, as if she were finding her way to some kind of supreme grace in the editing room. As in nature, The Tree of Life has spontaneous, convulsive moments of grace in unexpected places.

But that beach scene at the end was wack.

Speaking of awe and creatures at rest, I think Sheila's post about Cary Grant and Jafar Panahi knocked us all to the floor. There isn't much I can add to her statements there, unless y'all know the emoticon for a standing-o. I agree that the essential fight is wherever someone as noble as a humanist filmmaker can be silenced and jailed. I just happen to think that even in our much freer society there are jails and sanctions that go unnoticed most of the time because they aren't policed with arms or open threats. In this country, filmmakers (and citizens) police themselves into patterns that maintain the status quo. Whatever our ideals, we often set them aside in the interest of careerand family. That works out splendid for the (forgive me, Lord) 1%. What is our president if not an idealist who, in the interest of bipartisan cooperation and practicality, allowed 1% interests to sand his initial agenda down the near-nothing? He's a guy trying to hold onto his job, just like most of his constituents.

People trying to be free, whether in Iran or here in the States, are at the mercy of a powerful few who either misdirect their progressive instincts or outright suppress them. It's just a matter of degrees and distinct tactics. Either way, the bond that a truly free cinema could forges between peoples, beyond borders and beyond corporate lines of demarcation, is a dangerous possibility for the ruling elite, no matter which country serves as their perch or what set of directives-- whether enacted as law or carried out as corporate policy-- keeps the people in line.

That's why I can't quite see it all as just show business, Sheila. And, Jason and Simon, I can't settle for the tidy conclusion that, ultimately, show business is just a matter of giving the people what they want. Tastes are so rigidly enforced that the people generally want what NBC-Universal and Viacom want them to want.

I think the solution is to somehow make ticket prices superfluous. There must be some way for all the companies involved in the distribution and exhibition of movies to slake their greed that doesn't rely upon the box office. All they want is the money; isn't there a way to let them have it without having undue influence over the content and range of choices available to every moviegoer? Can somebody crunch the numbers on how to sustain a multiplex modeled after Family Dollar?

Sheila, I frequented the $2 theater in the 90's and remained a faithful regular as the price crept up to $3.50 and $4. It was the second-run Cineplex Odeon Worldwide Theater, and it was the dream: College kids, cops, stockbrokers, homeboys, dope fiends, office drones, Broadway dancers, cabbies, fry cooks... all of them cramming into this multiplex, slapping down pocket change to see whatever happened to be playing that day. For the price, you couldn't go wrong.

I remember seeing Peter Jackson's last great film, Heavenly Creatures, and David Lynch's Lost Highway at the Worldwide. Both were gorgeously projected, with sound that rivals anything I've experienced in the better New York City screening rooms. "Mummy! Mummy!" I remember some of the homeboys watching Heavenly Creatures calling out in fake New Zealand accents, mocking the 1950's schoolgirls addressing their mothers. But the jokes died down quickly as the story (and Jackson's operatic storytelling) cast a spell on the entire audience. Folks likely unaccustomed to sitting still for a foreign film ended up falling in love with and in awe of Heavenly Creatures. The Lost Highway screening was a riot. Packed house. Folks cursed loudly and laughed piteously throughout, but, even having paid so little at the door, not one person walked out. Everybody sat still for this experimental feature film with no great big stars in it and no clear-cut narrative line. Lynch's sensory seduction had them in a trance. Afterward in the lobby and out front, folks gathered in small groups to say, essentially (and in some cases literally), "WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT!" But they were grinning as they said it.

Yes, Jason, every seed like the lost Worldwide screenings eventually bears fruit somewhere in a moviegoer's imagination. The palate learns not to automatically recoil at an unfamiliar taste. Yes, it's a war of inches and all that. I am just forever searching for ways to accelerate the process.

Dennis, I believe every film from 2011 that I liked and, sight unseen, all 512 films that Simon watched (Does the boy ever sleep???) are worthy of a screen at the mainstream cinemas--even the awful ones. Let the big, bad ones remain in the mix, the way that you might photograph a slain beast alongside an object that provides a sense of scale. The great little films will cast that much brighter light in contrast to the shabby colossal films. All they need is a fair fight.

Lemme exhale some of this helium and get specific: It's absurd thatAttack the Block, the greatest sci-fi action adventure that Steven Spielberg and Ken Loach never made, grossed only $5 million worldwide. Since it cost $13 million, I suppose that makes it a huge flop. Despite all the critical praise and glowing word of mouth, 2011 was not AtB's year. I don't have any grand conspiracy theories about that one, just a deep sigh at what could have been. Director Joe Cornish grafted the disaffected teenage souls of Los Olvidados , Pixote, Sweet Sixteen and La Promesse onto a silly little crowd-pleasing monster movie. There is no good reason a film so entertaining, so prescient and attuned to its times while offering premium popcorn thrills should not gross more than Avatar, Titanic and Star Wars combined. Was its distributor, Sony Pictures/Screen Gems, too busy pushing forgettables like Green Hornet and Friends with Benefits?

Now, what moved me about Attack the Block? So many things, but nothing so much as the final image, of a 15 year old kid who was certain that he had no future or worth to anyone and thus never smiled--until now. The smile could only have been more moving if he'd turned to the camera, like Chaplin or Giulietta Masina. As it is, it's radiant enough to change the world-- if it could only get on enough screens.